Don't Work Hard!

On a beautiful evening, a gentleman was chasing after his mischievous yet adorable cat when he suddenly fell into a septic tank. Unfortunately, the tank’s cover was open, and in the darkness, he hadn’t noticed. The place was so dark that nothing could be seen around him. He stood there helplessly, waist-deep in a vile ocean of sewage, struggling to breathe despite the nauseating stench that made his stomach turn, doing everything he could just to stay alive. Terrified of slipping, he dared not walk or even move. All around him was pitch-black, suffocating darkness. There was no way to push through the thick, disgusting layers coating his entire body and inch forward bit by bit. Meanwhile, swarms of mosquitoes and countless other nameless, revolting insects were landing on his eyes, face, and nose, buzzing incessantly and irritatingly. (Friends! Stop, reread up to this, close your eyes and just imagine yourself in that situation!!……lol) Trapped in that sea of filth, he felt like the most wretched person on earth. Only one thought was spinning in his mind: somehow, he had to survive without losing consciousness for as long as possible. Without moving a muscle, he was enduring the overwhelming stench of that sewage ocean when suddenly, in the light of a car’s headlights from afar, he discovered there was a small market nearby. Without thinking, he began shouting at the top of his lungs:
Fire! Fire!! Fire!!! It worked. Within moments, some people returning home from the market gathered there and, with great effort, pulled him out and rescued him. Covered in foul-smelling filth from head to toe, he was freed from that stagnant, dense sea. After the rescue, when he felt somewhat better, everyone asked him: there was no fire anywhere here. Then why were you shouting Fire Fire!! like that? He immediately replied: If I had shouted Shit shit!! would you have come to rescue me?

From our earliest childhood, this has been drilled into our heads:
Study hard…..Work hard…….. In other words, whatever we do, it must be Hard! Our elders, having made their own lives into kerosene by doing everything Hard, give us the wisdom to turn our lives into kerosene too. Now think about this: if that man had started doing Hard work to escape from that sea of ‘hard water,’ what would have happened? Perhaps he would have died from thrashing his arms and legs around, suffocating in that terrible stench! What a putrid, stinking death that would have been! What’s needed in life is
Doing the right thing in the right time. Here it’s worth noting that the Right thing might not always be the Real thing. What is true may not always be right. If he had told the truth, his chances of surviving before it was too late would have been slim. For that moment, that was The right thing to do—telling a lie. When he realized that there might be people nearby, that was the Right time to make a decision, and the decision to lie was that Right decision. Any later, and it might have been much too late. It’s not always the case that being very late means being late by a lot of time. In this case, even being five minutes late might have caused him to lose consciousness and die. Therefore, success lies not just in Hard work, but in doing the Right work with effort. If the wisdom to do the Right work comes after the right time, it might not be useful. In that case, you must understand the Right time and develop the mentality to seize the opportunity at exactly that moment. No matter what your qualifications, skills, or intelligence may be, if you don’t know how to seize opportunities, what you deserve—what you yourself or others think you deserve—may never come to you. Success doesn’t depend on doing work through hard labor; it depends on doing the right work at the right time through hard labor. If you don’t know how to work intelligently, no matter how hard we labor, nothing will come of it. Therefore, deciding what work to do when and how is the preliminary step before starting any work.

Suppose you’re going to take a job exam. You mastered the wisdom and techniques for preparing yourself in the best possible way after turning thirty. What good will that do? What’s the use of being the world’s most qualified candidate for that job? Thirty is a cruelly significant age. Alas! After thirty, no one gives you a job! After thirty, no one gives you their heart!

Alright, you prepared. You’re taking the exam. You’re sitting there having mentally sworn: “Whatever is true, I shall write. I will write only the truth, nothing false.” Very good words indeed. Some questions didn’t come up as expected—meaning, you don’t know their answers. Therefore, in your unwavering decision not to commit the slightest falsehood on the sacred exam paper, you left those questions blank. You can’t give marks to a blank paper. Your friend also didn’t get those questions as expected. But instead of leaving those questions completely blank, he wrote something or other based on his assumptions, doing some creative guesswork. Because he couldn’t write precisely, the teacher got annoyed and gave fewer marks to each answer. He got low marks for writing incorrectly; you got zero for not writing at all. Which is better for getting that job? Getting zero by not writing anything on the exam paper is far worse than doing some creative guesswork and writing whatever comes to mind for a few pages to get half marks. The exam hall is not a place for showing off—it’s a place for getting marks, even if you have to beg for them. If you fool around with the exam, the job will fool around with you too. Or suppose you need to give a quotation in answer to a question on the exam paper. But you don’t know any relevant quotations. Instead of committing the great sin of writing someone’s statement based on guesswork, you wrote the answer without any quotation. Another examinee, using his extensive previous reading habits based on assumptions, sacrificed some honesty and convincingly made up some quotations. In the reference or source, he wrote something that would be very difficult and time-consuming to verify, and the teachers wouldn’t bother to do it either. This got him some extra marks. Even if it was just 4-5, it would add to the total marks! He got the job; you didn’t. With a chestful of honest consolation, you became perfectly happy with unemployment and cursing the system! You might say: what’s the need to get a job by such dishonesty? That’s utterly unethical work! Well, would Bangladesh’s growth rate decrease by a few percentage points if you were a little unethical? Or would World War III break out? Your friend has a job, you don’t—at the end of the day, only this matters, nothing else. However, if you decide to live happily in the peaceful coexistence of honest satisfaction and the dissatisfaction of unemployment, that’s a different matter altogether.

I’ve never heard that the techniques for doing well in war, love, and exams were ever entirely pure. You’ll buy a cat to kill mice in your house. You start thinking: what color cat should you buy? White? Or black? I would say, whether the cat is white or black doesn’t matter much; what matters is whether it can kill mice. However, if you’re buying the cat for pleasure, you might consider the color. Similarly, if you’re taking the exam only for self-satisfaction, you can just write down the exact right things and leave it at that. Come now, what if you write some wrong things—if the teacher gives you marks without knowing better, where’s the harm? If the teacher doesn’t know and gives marks for incorrect information, is that your fault or the teacher’s? I believe that the answers I write in exams are certainly not Classic texts. I never harbor the delusion that what I write in my exam papers will remain immortal on this earth. Among the possible final destinations of my exam paper, the one that gives me the most comfort to imagine is: a quiet corner of some silent park where a loving couple sits in private, their ancient silence of a thousand centuries broken by the envious rustle of a peanut bag during their stolen moments of bliss. I don’t take exams to write classic texts; I take exams to get marks. I am not sorry for this base mentality of mine. I’ve always observed that in neither love nor exams do the most qualified people ever achieve the greatest success.

You might work much harder for a job yet become much more frustrated. You’re preparing, which is good. But you also need to think about how much peace the way you’re preparing will ultimately give you. It’s not about carrying more load; carrying more of what needs to be carried more is what matters. When have the knowledgeable people of all subjects in the world, let alone the world, been able to give very much to themselves or their families? You’re spending sleepless nights after nights pursuing something that’s not needed at all. What fruit will you get from doing Hard work like this? First learn why, how, and when to plunge in. Then plunge in. Otherwise, like that foolish insect running toward false fire’s irresistible attraction, I don’t think much achievement will come besides ultimately meaningless death.

Doing some work in the Best possible way doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the Best possible result. Suppose you’re going to a Job interview. When selecting clothes, you decide you’ll enter the Interview board wearing the world’s most expensive outfit. With great care and enthusiasm, you go to the store and buy the world’s most expensive brands: green pants, red shirt, yellow shoes, and orange tie. Then what was bound to happen, happened. If you don’t get the job even after preparing so well, among the several reasons responsible for this, one is certainly this: the things you took to be so correct that you never even thought to consider anyone else’s different opinion—quite a few of those contained half-truths and lies.

Another thing. Hard work alone doesn’t accomplish everything. If it did, the donkey would be king of the forest, not the lion. You need to know the Smart way to do a task. This saves time and eliminates unnecessary work. It’s not just about doing the right work; doing the right work in the right way is what matters. If you think about any subject the same way the other 10 people think about it, you’ll get something average like the other 10 people. If the gentleman in the story had shouted for help by telling the truth like the other 10 people, or had started thrashing his arms and legs from the beginning, that might have been Genuine work or Hard work, but it wouldn’t have been Smart work. Practicing looking at events from different perspectives can give you the experience of seeing different endings to those events. The English foundation of a student who reads Thomson & Martinet or Nesfield or Swan first and then solves Living English Structure, versus one who repeatedly consults those authoritative books while solving Living English Structure—they won’t be the same! In my opinion, the second approach is better. In childhood, we friends would study the same teacher’s same notes and take exams, but get different marks. Here, different marks come due to differences in writing style. Depending on presentation techniques, who gets how many more or fewer marks than whom, even if it’s just half a mark. The task isn’t just writing answers in exams; the task is writing answers to get more marks.

Keep in mind the story I began with before starting any work. Sincerity and good intentions toward work don’t make people successful; rather, sincerity and good intentions toward the right work, in the right way, at the right time make people successful. Stay well, move forward.